Taking the Outsider's Perspective

Text: Jeremiah 2:4-13

I thought since Jeremiah figured so prominently in last week’s sermon, and will again be the central them in next week’s Rally Sunday service, it might be a good idea to keep things a little consistent. Stick with Jeremiah, build on what’s already there, and it might build up some theological momentum for what is to come next week. Sounds like a plan. Yet with any good text, it has a power all of its own. This isn’t just a transition from one part of the book to the other, but a living, breathing text all of its own that is seldom heard. Preachers, more often than not, seem to go after the Gospel text. Maybe it’s because it’s more familiar,

If last week we had Jeremiah’s call, this week we have the whole reason why God sought out Jeremiah in the first place. As Christians, most of the time when we read the prophets, we tend to think of them as proclaiming something that is to come later at some distant time in the future. Yet the prophets didn’t work in a vacuum, and we do them and us a disservice when we remove them completely from their own time. Prophets had a unique role within Israel’s society. Think of them as the ombudsman or auditor who kept the people honest, reminding them of their connection to God… They spoke very much to the time and place in which they lived, sometimes the people listened, most of the time they didn’t. Yet history would ultimately vindicate them, and their voice would live on long past their death. Like many others, this would be Jeremiah’s story.

Jeremiah saw things that weren’t right in Israel’s society. He had the insight to see that something was wrong, and was able to give God’s indignation a voice.

“Thus says the Lord,” Jeremiah would say, the hallmark of the prophet. These proclamations would then take on the quality of God speaking in the first person. It had the effect of being far more personal. Instead of Jeremiah saying that “God is really upset that you did such and such” he takes it one step closer… “I am upset with you!” It is a reminder that Israel’s relationship with God was a personal one, which made the lament that much more painful.

“What wrong did your ancestors find in me, that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?”

Jeremiah’s proclamation doesn’t say that things have only just gone off the rails… but that things have been off the rails for generations. We know from the story of Exodus that even the freshly-released slaves from Egypt were prone to wandering off on their own, fashioning idols, seeming to quickly forget exactly who it was that freed them.

Yet this isn’t the usual rant about how Israel has gone off after other gods. Just as he’s getting warmed up, Jeremiah pulls the camera back, and looks at the wider world around him. “Let’s go out to the coasts of Cyprus, way across the sea, or let’s head down south to the land of Kedar, far across the Arabian deserts… let’s take a look at all those far flung places and see if any other nation has ever changed their gods! Has it happened? No! And what’s more stunning, is that these gods aren’t gods at all!”

This is where things begin to open up. This is where the light really starts to peek in, even if only a crack. The outsider’s perspective helps us to really understand what was going on.

Jeremiah rants with God’s voice isn’t just a lament. “What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me?” I think the wrong that they found was that God, who had freed them from the bonds of slavery in Egypt was one who had no bounds, no limits. They came face to face with the living God, and it was not something that they could control… and that’s a frightening prospect. Other nations had other gods that they had fashioned in their own image… images and idols that they could themselves control and place limits on… but not Yahweh, not the Lord who had brought them out of Egypt into a new land where they could live as free people. This was something that was beyond their control… who also told them not to make idols or images to worship, to remember that we cannot control God.

Yet no sooner had they been freed that they began to do exactly that: try and control God… and if they couldn’t control God, they would work with images and gods that they would have power over themselves. Other gods, that they could control… that would justify their own choices and actions… This is why other nations never seemed to change their gods, because their gods always seemed to like what those who were in charge said.

This is where things begin to open up for us. As human beings we have this want or desire to control our environment and those things around us. Atheists have long argued that we create God or gods in our own image, to suit our own needs and wants. To a certain extent, this is true! We are constantly tempted to make God fit our own needs and wants. We try to domesticate God to our own liking, or worse yet, to justify our own political agendas.

The worst examples in the church’s history are those times when we have done exactly that, when we have essentially tried to create God in our image… when we try to domesticate Jesus. One of the most offensive examples in recent memory was a picture of Jesus wrapped in the American flag on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in early 2003. It was circulated around the internet via email. While intended for an American audience, the fluidity of the internet saw some of those emails make their way north. The implication was that the invasion was God’s will, and if you opposed it, you opposed God and therefore were condemning your own soul to hell. It may not have been that blunt, but the intention was very clearly put forward to silence critics. More than four years later, the critics now sound like prophets. Unfortunately, history is full of other examples, it is a constant temptation that can really damage our relationship with God.

The saving grace is that our faith has this constant built-in critique. Jeremiah takes the outsider’s perspective, helping the people look back at themselves, and hold it up with what they claim to be. Israel claimed to be God’s chosen people, with a unique history and a special relationship with God. Yet here they were, all too ready to turn their back on all that because they couldn’t make God fit their own whims. Prophets like Jeremiah remind us that God cannot be domesticated, controlled, or placed into a box to suit our own needs. God cannot be bound by any limits that we seek, so that we can then comfortable with the Divine. To do so is to literally go after other gods.

Jeremiah reminds them of their ancestors, that when the people forget their own story, their life becomes distorted… perhaps even a dangerous perversion of what it was intended to be. After all, when God becomes simply a justification for anything they do, that is the point where they are capable of committing the greatest evil. Jeremiah reminds them that God has been faithful in the past, even when they weren’t. They no longer actively look for God in their midst, and therefore seem to go after worthless things. The most powerful line is this comparison is like they are building cracked cisterns. They are great structures that look nice, but ultimately, it doesn’t hold any water.

The lesson we learn from Jeremiah is two fold… first: reminding ourselves to not try to domesticate God to serve our own purpose, and second: to also ask where we see God working in our lives. If we can’t domesticate God with the first question, then the second one may mean that we’re looking in places we may never have thought of before. It may mean that we need to take a few steps back, to take the outsider’s perspective, and we may catch a glimpse of what God is doing in our lives… both as individuals, and as a congregation. Ultimately, it’s a worthwhile exercise, and it may lead us in places we never expected or imagined… but there’s something right about it, because we know it’s where God wants us to be.

Amen.